Dijon to Den Haag

After Plan A of getting from Barcelona to Brussels failed, Plan B was to get as far north as possible, then catch the first train to Paris then to Brussels in the morning. Spending the night in Dijon was a huge luxary.. we got a cheap hotel near the train station which had the most amazing beds ever and we washed our clothes in the sink. We got up at 6 to try to make reservations to Paris, and again were dissapointed when we were informed it was already fully booked.

Crazy Sunrise in Dijon

I don't know how people are supposed to travel without more than a days notice. The nice man at the ticket counter told us we could get to Brussels and then Den Haag via Luxembourg without any reservations, so we decided to follow his advice.

Excited for lunch?

After a train change to Metz, we landed in Luxembourg with 9 minutes to make our train connection. We quickly bought a sandwich and a postcard and hopped on our train to Brussels.

Luxembourg from the train

Three and a half hours later we arrived in Brussels, and having just missed our connection to what we think was an accident... our French is atrocious so we don't actually know, but we decided to still knock off our Brussels wish list, but instead of having 2 days to do it, we had 55 minutes until the next train to Den Haag.




We started off with tasting Belgian beer, then had a massive waffle covered in Haagen Daas.

Gill's Belgian Beer

Excited for my Belgian Waffle

After the waffle we felt like such shit that we quickly bought a box of Belgian chocolates and found our way to the train to sit down.

Gill, full after waffle

Luckily we did find the train early since it was really busy. The good thing about leaving France, Luxenbourg and Belgium is that they no longer expected tourists to know the language, and train announcements were repeated in English.

Happy to be on our last train of the day

We arrived in our fourth country of the day just after dark and attempted to follow the directions we were given by Jim (our dads friend) to his place. Turns out our directions were from Den Haag Centraal, but we were at Den Haag HS. The directions to go upstairs and catch the #6 tram made no sense, because we were in a train station, how can you go upstairs?

Gillian finally asked someone where the #6 was and that was when we realized we were at the wrong train station. We bought some strippenkarts and tried to figure out the tram system to make our way to Den Haag Centraal. Once there the upstairs directions made much more sense since there actually is an upstairs where you can catch trams, with the actual trains running underneath.

We got off the #6 at Hofzichtlaan and then attempted to follow the further directions of walking clockwise to the first apartment. We mused at what walking clockwise would entail, and then just started checking nearby apartments. The second apartment building we checked was theirs, and we headed up to meet Jim and Julie. Their place is fantastic.. so freaking nice, considering the outside of the apartment building looks really average. We were happy to sleep in a really nice bed for the second night in a row.